Ethan v. Dragon

My buddy Charlie just sent me a few more photos from my recent trip to China. For your viewing pleasure:

Turkey to stomach: yum!

Bad joke: Know how to keep a turkey in suspense? Put him in a circular room and tell him to sit in the corner.

Stupid. Ok. Well, it's a good thing hardly anyone reads this blog, because otherwise there'd be a lot of people sitting around in suspense.



So for those of you wondering if the turkey turned out ok, it did. It was moist, flavorful and devoured by a happy family...like all good turkeys should be.

So now I'm back in Manhattan after my brief trip to America, where everyone drives around in big cars, lives in big houses, shops fopr big deals at big stores and, uh, wears big pants. The little corner of South Carolina I just visited is so much more representative of America than is New York. I sometimes forget that New York isn't just mildly unique amongst American cites, but a wild anomoly more akin to a foreign country. It's that different. And while I'm glad to be back in the East Village, I definitely feel my sail blowing to calmer waters.

The weekend was great -- I got a chance to meet my sister's boyfriend, Adrian, who seems like a really good egg. We all just bummed around and played and joked together...it was a relaxed weekend. The weather was nice and crisp. My mom's neighbor, Michael took us for a ride in his powerboat on the Black River. He pointed out historical landmarks -- like the canal dug by slave labor -- as well as local flora and fauna, such as osprey nests. The air was cool and fresh and there was hardly a soul on the water aside from us. Delightful, pure, relaxing.

On Saturday night I played a "house concert" for all of my mom's friends. It was such a pleasure -- to play for an audience of twenty or so folks who listened carefully to each song, applauded afterwards and showed great interest. Such a contrast from all of my performances in NY.




Adrian, Shayna and Sharon on the river.
An osprey nest in a dead tree on the Black River.
Adrian and Shayna walking the golf course in late afternoon.
One of the little canals we went through -- lots of the trees are covered in moss like this...makes it super spooky.
So yeah, vacation photos...has it come to this?

Turkey to death: hello!

Nothing like home cooking -- especially when I'm in my parents' home. It's so nice here -- in South Carolina...a little town called Georgetown near Myrtle Beach. I flew in yesterday and worked from my parents' home most of the day. When I finally finished, my mom, Seymour and I went to dinner at a place called the Rice Patty. Sounds Asian, but it's not. South Carolina was a big rice producing region back in the day. The dinner was amazing. Really -- great food, ambiance and company.

So this morning I awoke pretty early (given that it's a holiday) and started cooking with my mom. She wouldn't let me take any photos of her because she wasn't "made up" yet. Not that she needs a bunch of makeup or anything. Anyway, you'll see her hands in the photos below. She drew a face (a pilgrim!) on her hand with magic marker so that the photos would have a little more personality :-)

So the first step was to make some flavorful stuffing. My mom and I chopped up onions, garlic, dill, carrots, celery, apples, oranges, prunes, dates, raisins, dried cranberries and a pomegranate.
Then I sauteed the concoction for a while. Once it was cooked through, I added some chicken broth and some white wine.

Meanwhile, my mom demonstrated this season's latest fashion: turkey gloves!


After mom cleaned the turkey, I stuffed it full of the yummy, fruity stuffing. I think the orange flavor was a little over-powering, but we'll see. The onions and garlic will probably come through more when it's cooked for a while.

Here's my mom trussing up the turkey. We used a little bit of tinfoil to make a turkey-stuffing-diaper so the stuffing wouldn't fall out of the turkey's ass. Why?

Because we're using one of those "set it and forget it" thingamajigs instead of an oven. This is my mom holding up the turkey after impaling it on the brochettes used in the rotisserie cooker. See? She drew a little happy pilgrim face on her hand. Hurray for seasonal hand puppets.

It took a bit of effort, but we got the 14.5lb turkey spinning in the rotisserie machine. One of the wings was rubbing the heating elements in back, so we had to do a little triage. An extra string to hold the wing in place did the trick.

Oh, and we bought a flavor-injector for $2.44 at Wal-Mart last night. I took the juice from the stuffing and injected it into the turkey thighs and breast. You should have seen them plump up. It was totally hot.


So the turkey is now set and I am trying my best to forget. It's going to be about 4 hours total in there cooking, but it already smells awesome. Ok, so it's noon now and any minute my sisters and Adrian will show up. Can't wait!

If only it were true...

Just read a great petition authored by Michael Moore. Would be great is every congressman signed it.

Photos and impressions from China

This has been a pretty big year for travelling to emerging markets...it's defintiely been the theme for me, anyway. India, Brazil, China...Brooklyn. Ok, kidding about Brooklyn.

At the IBM event in China earlier this week I got a chance to hear
Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat" pitch again. It's interesting to
hear him do it in front of a crowd of Chinese people as opposed to back
in the US. Either way, it's all about money, really. Who is going to
exploit whom? He says at one point, "It's either going to happen to
you, or you're going to do it to someone else." And by that he means being globalized.

You could read all this very cynically, of course, or choose to read it as something inevitable with a possibility for hope. Friedman outlines the three stages of globalization. First, he says, was Globalization 1.0, which was primarily prosecuted by nations. No big surprise there, nations were the only entities with the wherewithall to travel across the globe and haul stuff back (often taken at the tip of a sword, but still.) Then around the turn of the century came Globalization 2.0 -- that's the one we're so familiar with executed by corporations. Ok, again no big surprise -- you don't have to look much beyond the homepage of your favorite news source to see that in action every day. Hell, I live on the front lines of that battle.

But when he gets to Globalization 3.0 -- individuals -- my ears perk up a bit. Yeah, he asserts that the next phase in globalization will be carried out by individuals like you and me and Sanjeev and Raul and their peers in China, Eastern Europe and the rest of the developing world. With all this available bandwidth, anyone can hop on and compete for knowledge-based work from anywhere in the world. And with the advent of tools like Second Life (yes, I said tools, not games) virtual collaboration will get better and better until it ultimately obviates the need for most business travel. That's not next week, but sure it's not next century either.

Why does this make me hopeful? Well, it seems like there's a decent opportunity for people to regain some control of their lives and self-organize in ways that are decent and fair rather than hierarchichal, arbitrary and capricious. Can you imagine a world populated by billions of freelancers? That would be a market that ruthlessly favored talent and responsibility, wouldn't it? I mean, you would hire people based on their skills and reliability over any other attribute, wouldn't you? In my humble opinion, that's the kind of world I want to live in. It feels more like a meritocracy than the one we live in now.

Not exactly vacation
When I was walking through the forbidden city I walked into a show-room with all the armour and weapons of the Qing dynasty. Fascinating...it was mostly swords and spears along with some rudimentary firearms. One of the placards read something along the lines of "at the end of the battle it became clear that the weapons of the invading Westerners were far superior to those of the emporer's armies."

How about that? How about facing armies of far less sophisticated people (because really, the culture of the invading Westerners was cro-magnon by comparison to the Chinese) and being outgunned and conquered? I guess that's the case all over the map. but in some ways now the West is getting its comeuppance. This flattening world is proving that the mind and spirit of the folks in the conquered regions are just as capable. And now they're about to take back some of the advantage that was robbed from them.

If salaries in the West drop precipitously in equal measure to gains made in emerging markets i wouldn't be surprised at all. It's an inevitability. The West built up this luxurious life by extracting all that it needed by force. Let's just hope this equalization happens over a long enough period of time so that its not a shift characterized by wars and revolutions.

Freidman pointed out that if you asked him thirty years ago if he'd rather be a genius growing up in Bangalore or a B-student growing up in Brooklyn, the choice would be clear. The quality of life available to an average kid in the States far outstripped that of even the brightest kid in India. But now? The tables are turning...and fast.

PS. I bought a Chinese lute.

Back in Beijing

About an hour ago I landed in Beijing. I'm here for a big event IBM is doing called InnovationJam.

I know, it's been a long while since I've updated this blog (sorry, Geeti, I'm a slacker...but at least I am able to multi-slack.) But right now I just have time to post a photo from my hotel window before I run off to work.

I'll only be in China for a few days, but every time I step foot off of American soil I learn volumes and feel like I have done some sort of honorable service as a world citizen. It feels great, It feels right. More to come...